The Tampa Bay Buccaneers had better be right about Josh Freeman.
No big deal or anything. If general manager Mark Dominik and new coach Raheem Morris got this pick wrong then this franchise is bound for mediocrity — or worse — for the foreseeable future.
Don’t believe me? Consider this.
By selecting a quarterback with their first-ever draft pick (and the first Bucs QB drafted in the first round since Trent Dilfer), the Bucs have said Freeman is their future.
On paper, he should have been a top-five pick. Freeman is 6-foot-6, 250 pounds with a very strong arm. He has good poise in the pocket and is athletic enough to have run for 14 touchdowns last year. His touchdown-to-interception ratio got better in each of his three years at Kansas State. He completed nearly 60 percent of his passes, throwing 20 TDs against eight interceptions last year. Durability is not an issue since he started the last 32 games of his college career.
He was also inconsistent against the better teams he faced. He also did not face many good defenses in his career, playing in the Big 12 (same could be said for USC product Mark Sanchez in the Pac-10 who went to the Jets at No. 5).
If you take out the non-BCS schools on his schedule last year, he was but a 55 percent QB who threw just 12 TDs against those eight picks. If he is no better than average after three years of experience against the Big 12, how in the world can he be good in the NFL? And he has to at least be good. You can’t win anything in the NFL these days with merely an average QB.
This pick reminds me an awful lot of when the Minnesota Vikings drafted Daunte Culpepper 10 years ago. The Vikings desperately needed defense (so did the Bucs) but drafted the UCF standout because they thought he was just going to be too good to pass up.
The Vikings made Culpepper their third-string QB his rookie year while getting by with a couple of veteran QBs in Randall Cunningham and Jeff George. By his second season they turned the keys of the franchise over to the big, strong-armed, athletic QB who had played against mostly inferior competition.
Culpepper was terrific for five years (until he got hurt). Dennis Green and the Vikings were right. The kid was too good to pass up.
Let’s hope for the Bucs’ sake that Freeman is much more Culpepper than David Carr, Kyle Boller, J.P. Losman or Alex Smith, all “franchise” QBs taken in the high to-mid first rounds of the draft this decade.
Do you know what these quarterbacks have in common? All of them helped get their coaches fired and all but one got their GM fired as well.
Over three months ago I urged Dominik and Morris to go get a QB. They missed out on Jay Cutler and wouldn’t pay the price (would have cost them five picks/players) for Sanchez. Well, they got their QB. I applaud your convictions. Now he just has to be good. When will we know if he’s any good? Not for at least two years. Could be three.
That’s no problem if you are right. That’s a waste of time if you are wrong. And two or three years in the NFL is an eternity.
It was just two years ago this month that Michael Vick was the unquestioned starting QB for the Atlanta Falcons.
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